WHY

Why do I push so hard – trying to improve … trying to become better … trying to do more … trying to beat my last best …?   

Why am I so adamant that personal development must be a continuous and ever-mindful process? 

What is the point of pushing ourselves, denying ourselves gratifications, and making sacrifices large and small? 

[Haven’t we done enough already?]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Because: Life does not just keep getting better all by itself.  “Finally arrived” – wherever we might think that is or should be (e.g., age 16, 18, 21, graduated, married, got a job, etc.) – is only a temporary and very fragile place.   

Because:  The PUSH reduces the proportion of closed doors and blind alleys we otherwise encounter and results in both more choices and better choices. 

NOTE: Paradoxically, the more one pushes, the bigger the load gets.  This is discouraging to most, but that’s life!  However, in pushing – if we push purposefully and intentionally, we become stronger, smarter, more capacitized and more “accomplished”.  When we push less, there becomes less to push.  Happy Day!  Well, not quite.  When we run out of things to push, we run out of life.  That’s an option I can live without.

Because: It allows me to sleep better at night and allows me to feel better about myself in harsh daylight. 

Because:  Newtown/Sandy Hook, Hurricane Sandy and other tragedies of overwhelming loss keep happening, and the best way I can deal with them is to keep fighting.

A horse came upon a sparrow lying on the street, feet in the air, hyperventilating and in obvious angst.  The horse quizzically asked the sparrow what on earth he was doing.  The sparrow said he heard the sky was falling and he was trying to help.  Nearly convulsing with laughter, the horse bellowed, “What can you do with those silly little twig legs of yours to keep the sky from falling?”  The sparrow replied – with utmost conviction and determination: “One does what one can.”  Anne Lamott

Because:  None of us “arrived” wherever we are under our own steam, and cannot, thus, claim all the entitlements we’d like to think should be ours for the duration.  The considerable subsidies and fundamental/foundational dependencies currently floating my boat – and your boat – will eventually run out.   

Because:  The responsibilities don’t quit coming but keep escalating, the costs keep escalating, the tests get harder, and failure has greater and tougher consequences the farther we fail to go.   

Because: The “filter” of our own experience is flawed.  Personal scotomas and myopias, combined with the lack of a fully reflective visioning capacity, gives us an errant and incomplete view of the world and of our place in it.  So, in a very real sense, we have to overcompensate.  

Because:  Habits, inclinations and “natural” tendencies allow us to drift into dangerous, debilitating and unpotable waters.  

Because:  Being “in a league of our own” … making our own rules and being our own referee … is a game nobody wins.     

Because:  We all have an unbelievable number of unfounded assumptions and unrealistic expectations to overcome.   

Because:  There are no shortcuts to our Truest Destiny.  It’s going to take everything we’ve got.  We are given all the time and tools needed to make a successful passage, and wasting either of them ties the hands of Destiny against all odds of our ever truly “making it”.    

Because: Trivial engagements, diversions and gratifications simply don’t have lasting value.

Because:  We’d just rather NOT if we don’t HAVE TO – and need to get over it.

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing we want.” (Calvin).

Because:  I’m worth it and my dignity demands it!  Sooner or later we will tire of not getting what we “deserve”; we’ll hit a glass ceiling we never saw coming; we won’t have the tools and tickets for the Big League Dance; and, ultimately, we will lose the two things we most covet: Control and Legitimacy (Integrity).    

Because: I have seen hopelessness and I have felt hopelessness and I have known last-straw desperation.  Without Hope and without a reasonable sense of eventual surmountability, there is no tomorrow worth fighting for.   

Because: My song can’t be sung by anybody else.  If I don’t sing my song as only I can sing it – with everything that’s in me, I am diminished, along with Hope and Justice and Truth and Destiny.  Quartermaster

…

“Life is either a great adventure or nothing.”

Helen Keller

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Alfred Tennyson

[ From “Ulysses”]

“There’s always a new mistake to be made.”

[Overhead on NPR’s “The Story”]